Second Amendment to the United States Constitution

"The historical record provides compelling evidence that racism underlies gun control laws; and not in any subtle way. Throughout much of American history, gun control was openly stated as a method for keeping blacks and Hispanics 'in their place', and to quiet the racial fears of whites. This paper is intended to provide a brief summary of this unholy alliance of gun control and racism, and to suggest that gun control laws should be regarded as "suspect ideas," analogous to the 'suspect classifications' theory of discrimination already part of the American legal system. Racist arms laws predate the establishment of the United States."

"The end of slavery in 1865 did not eliminate the problems of racist gun control laws; the various Black Codes adopted after the Civil War required blacks to obtain a license before carrying or possessing firearms or Bowie knives; these are sufficiently well-known that any reasonably complete history of the Reconstruction period mentions them. These restrictive gun laws played a part in the efforts of the Republicans to get the Fourteenth Amendment ratified, because it was difficult for night riders to generate the correct level of terror in a victim who was returning fire. It does appear, however, that the requirement to treat blacks and whites equally before the law led to the adoption of restrictive firearms laws in the south that were equal in the letter of the law, but unequally enforced. It is clear that the vagrancy statutes adopted at roughly the same time, in 1866, were intended to be used against blacks, even though the language was race-neutral. The former states of the Confederacy, many of which had recognized the right to carry arms openly before the civil war, developed a very sudden willingness to qualify that right. One especially absurd example, and one that includes strong evidence of the racist intentions behind gun control laws, is Texas."

"The question might be asked what relevance the racist past of gun control laws has. One concern is that the motivations for disarming blacks in the past are really not so different from the motivations for disarming law-abiding citizens today. In the last century, the official rhetoric in support of such laws was that 'they' were too violent, too untrustworthy, to be allowed weapons. Today, the same elitist rhetoric regards law-abiding Americans in the same way, as child-like creatures in need of guidance from the government. In the last century, while never openly admitted, one of the goals of disarming blacks was to make them more willing to accept various forms of economic oppression, including the sharecropping system, in which free blacks were reduced to an economic state not dramatically superior to the conditions of slavery."

"Gun control has historically been a tool of racism, and associated with racist attitudes about black violence. Similarly, many gun control laws impinge on that most fundamental of rights, self-defense. Racism is so intimately tied to the history of gun control in America that we should regard gun control aimed at law-abiding people as a 'suspect idea', and require that the courts use the same demanding standards when reviewing the constitutionality of a gun control law, that they would use with respect to a law that discriminated based on race."

"If gun laws in fact worked, the sponsors of this type of legislation should have no difficulty drawing upon long lists of examples of crime rates reduced by such legislation. That they cannot do so after a century and a half of trying — that they must sweep under the rug the southern attempts at gun control in the 1870-1910 period, the northeastern attempts in the 1920-1939 period, the attempts at both Federal and State levels in 1965-1976 — establishes the repeated, complete and inevitable failure of gun laws to control serious crime."

"Madison did not invent the right to keep and bear arms when he drafted the Second Amendment – the right was pre-existing at both common law and in the early state constitutions."

"Nothing in the history, construction, or interpretation of the Amendment applies or infers such a protection. Rather, legal protection for personal self-defense arises from the British common law tradition and modern criminal law; not from constitutional law."

"Consider, for example, the term 'people' in the First Amendment—'Congress shall make no law . . . prohibiting . . . the right of the people peaceably to assemble . . . . '[180] If it is hard to construe the word 'people' in the Fourth Amendment to be anything but a reference to individuals, it is equally difficult to construe the term in the First Amendment as anything but a collective right. Clearly, the idea of the people assembling contemplates a large [Page 231] number of people and not a single person assembling. Thus, linguistically, the term 'people' in the Second Amendment might be interpreted 'either way.' Standing alone, the phrase 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms' could apply to individuals or collectively to 'the people.' But, unlike the use of the word in the Fourth Amendment, the Second Amendment ties the term 'people' to a collective entity, the 'well regulated Militia' which is 'necessary to the security of a free State.' This understanding is also supported by the original wording of the Amendment, which referred to the 'body' of the people. Linguistically, the Amendment can easily be read to concern the 'body'of the people. The Amendment does not say, 'individually armed citizens, being necessary to the security of a free state . . . . ' The Amendment explicitly refers to the 'militia,' a collective organization and a specific kind of militia at that one that is 'well regulated.' It is hard to imagine individuals being 'well regulated' by the government. They are only 'regulated' as a group."

"Why would an ultimately factual question about the consequences of gun control laws divide people along ideological lines? Only if at least one set of people were more devoted to their vision than to the facts. This shows up when gun control zealots are asked whether whatever new law they propose would have prevented the shooting rampage that they are using as a stage from which to propose a new clampdown on gun ownership. Almost always, the new law being proposed would not have made the slightest difference. That too is part of the farce. A deadly farce. So is the automatic assertion that whoever engaged in a shooting rampage was a madman. Yet these supposedly crazy shooters are usually rational enough to choose some "gun-free zone" for their murderous attacks. They seem more rational than gun control zealots who keep creating more 'gun-free zones'. Gun control zealots are almost always people who are lenient toward criminals, while they are determined to crack down on law-abiding citizens who want to be able to defend themselves and their loved ones."

"The grand illusion of zealots for laws preventing ordinary, law-abiding people from having guns is that "gun control" laws actually control guns. In a country with many millions of guns, not all of them registered, this is a fantasy and a farce. Guns do not vanish into thin air because there are gun control laws. Guns — whether legal or illegal — can last for centuries. Passing laws against guns may enable zealots to feel good about themselves, but at the cost of other people's lives. Why anyone would think that criminals who disobey other laws, including laws against murder, would obey gun control laws is a mystery. A disarmed population makes crime a safer occupation and street violence a safer sport."

"Almost invariably, mass shootings occur in gun-free settings. Yet gun control zealots seem determined to create more gun-free settings. How often have supposedly mentally unbalanced shooters opened fire at a meeting of the National Rifle Association? They are apparently not that mentally unbalanced. They pick places where people are not likely to shoot back. A mass shooting at a movie theater a few years ago took place at a theater farther away from where the shooter lived than other theaters in the area that were showing the very same movie. The difference was that this theater had advertised that it was a gun-free zone. Who is more mentally unbalanced, those who are doing the shooting or those who refuse to examine the facts about what kinds of places attract such shooters? Schools and religious institutions are sitting ducks, and the shootings there have gone on until someone else with a gun showed up on the scene. That is what puts an end to the carnage, not gun control laws. People who are prepared to defy the laws against murder are not very likely to be stopped by laws against guns. Only law-abiding citizens are likely to be stopped by gun control laws, and to become sitting ducks. As for facts and statistics, the only ones likely to be mentioned by gun control zealots, including the media, are those on how many people were killed by guns. How many lives were saved by guns will never make it through the ideological filters of the media, the political establishment or our educational institutions. Yet factual data on how many threats or attacks were deterred in a given year by displaying a firearm have long been available. Seldom is it necessary to actually pull the trigger to get some thug or criminal to back off and go elsewhere, often in some haste. Are the only lives that matter those that are lost, usually because there is no gun immediately available to protect them, but not the lives saved because they did have a gun at hand to protect them? Gun control zealots seem especially opposed to people being allowed to carry their guns concealed. But concealed weapons protect not only those who carry them, but also to some extent those who do not, because criminals have no way of knowing in advance who does and does not have a gun. Muggings and rapes become much more dangerous activities for criminals where many law-abiding people are allowed to carry concealed guns. It can take a lot of the fun out of being a thug."

"The majority falls prey to the delusion, popular in some circles, that ordinary people are too careless and stupid to own guns, and we would be far better off leaving all weapons in the hands of professionals on the government payroll. But the simple truth, born of experience, is that tyranny thrives best where government need not fear the wrath of an armed people... A revolt by Nat Turner and a few dozen other armed blacks could be put down without much difficulty; one by four million armed blacks would have meant big trouble. All too many of the other great tragedies of history, Stalin's atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few, were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. Many could well have been avoided or mitigated, had the perpetrators known their intended victims were equipped with a rifle and twenty bullets apiece, as the Militia Act required here. ... If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars."

"In sum, we hold that the District's ban on handgun possession in the home violates the Second Amendment, as does its prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense."

"We uphold the right of individual Americans to own firearms, a right which antedated the constitution and was solemnly confirmed by the Second Amendment. We applaud the Supreme Court's decision in Heller affirming that right, and we assert the individual responsibility to safely use and store firearms. We call on the next president to appoint judges who will similarly respect the constitution. Gun ownership is responsible citizenship, enabling Americans to defend themselves, their property, and communities. We call for education in constitutional rights in schools, and we support the option of firearms training in federal programs serving senior citizens and women. We urge immediate action to review the automatic denial of gun ownership to returning members of the armed forces who have suffered trauma during service to their country. We condemn frivolous lawsuits against firearms manufacturers, which are transparent attempts to deprive citizens of their rights. We oppose federal licensing of law-abiding gun owners and national gun registration as violations of the Second Amendment. We recognize that gun control only affects and penalizes law-abiding citizens, and that such proposals are ineffective at reducing violent crime."

"Every black person in America should get a gun and join the National Rifle Association, America's oldest and most august civil rights organization. Apparently this has occurred to no one because our excellent public education system ensures that no American under the age of sixty has the slightest notion of this country's history. Gun control laws were originally promulgated by Democrats to keep guns out of the hands of blacks. This allowed the Democratic policy of slavery to proceed with fewer bumps and, after the Civil War, allowed the Democratic Ku Klux Klan to menace and murder black Americans with little resistance. Contrary to what illiterates believe, the KKK was an outgrowth of the Democratic Party, with overlapping membership rolls. The Klan was to the Democrats what the American Civil Liberties Union is today. Not every Democrat is an ACLU'er, but every ACLU'er is a Democrat. Same with the Klan."

"In 1640, the very first gun control law ever enacted on these shores was passed in Virginia. It provided that blacks, even freemen, could not own guns. Chief Justice Roger Taney's infamous opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford circularly argued that blacks could not be citizens because if they were citizens, they would have the right to own guns: "[I]t would give them the full liberty," he said, "to keep and carry arms wherever they went." With logic like that, Republicans eventually had to fight a Civil War to get the Democrats to give up slavery. Alas, they were Democrats, so they cheated. After the war, Democratic legislatures enacted 'Black Codes', denying black Americans the rights of citizenship, such as the rather crucial one of bearing arms, while other Democrats, sometimes the same Democrats, founded the Ku Klux Klan. For more than a hundred years, Republicans have aggressively supported arming blacks, so they could defend themselves against Democrats. The original draft of the Anti-Klan Act of 1871, passed at the urging of Republican president Ulysses S. Grant, made it a federal felony to 'deprive any citizen of the United States of any arms or weapons he may have in his house or possession for the defense of his person, family, or property'. This section was deleted from the final bill only because it was deemed both beyond Congress' authority and superfluous, inasmuch as the rights of citizenship included the right to bear arms. Under authority of the Anti-Klan Act, President Grant deployed the U.S. military to destroy the Klan, and pretty nearly completed the job. But the Klan had a few resurgences in the early and mid-20th century. Curiously, wherever the Klan became a political force, gun control laws would suddenly appear on the books. This will give you an idea of how gun control laws worked."

"Following the firebombing of his house in 1956, Dr. Martin Luther King, who was, among other things, a Christian minister, applied for a gun permit, but the Alabama authorities found him unsuitable. A decade later, he won a Nobel Peace Prize. How's that 'may issue' gun permit policy working for you? The NRA opposed these discretionary gun permit laws and proceeded to grant NRA charters to blacks who sought to defend themselves from Klan violence, including the great civil rights hero Robert F. Williams. A World War II Marine veteran, Williams returned home to Monroe, N.C., to find the Klan riding high, beating, lynching and murdering blacks at will. No one would join the NAACP for fear of Klan reprisals. Williams became president of the local chapter and increased membership from six to more than 200. But it was not until he got a charter from the NRA in 1957 and founded the Black Armed Guard that the Klan got their comeuppance in Monroe. Williams' repeated thwarting of violent Klan attacks is described in his stirring book, Negroes With Guns. In one crucial battle, the Klan seiged the home of a black physician and his wife, but Williams and his Black Armed Guard stood sentry and repelled the larger, cowardly force. And that was the end of it. As the Klan found out, it's not so much fun when the rabbit's got the gun. The NRA's proud history of fighting the Klan has been airbrushed out of the record by those who were complicit with the KKK, Jim Crow and racial terror, to wit, the Democrats... Gun control is always a scheme of the powerful to deprive the powerless of the right to self-defense."

"Control criminals not guns; criminals by definition are lawbreakers and will not alter their behavior in deference to a law. Enacting gun laws to control criminals makes as much sense as trying to require rapist to wear condoms."

"Gun safety laws, there are a few inconvenient facts... Liberals are sometimes glib about equating guns and danger. In fact, it's complicated. The number of guns in America has increased by more than 50 percent since 1993, and in that same period the gun homicide rate in the United States has dropped by half... The assault weapons ban. A 113-page study found no clear indication that it reduced shooting deaths for the 10 years it was in effect. That's because the ban was poorly drafted and because even before the ban, assault weapons accounted for only 2 percent of guns used in crimes. Move on to open-carry and conceal-carry laws. With some 13 million Americans now licensed to pack a concealed gun, many liberals expected gun battles to be erupting all around us. In fact, the most rigorous analysis suggests that all these gun permits caused neither a drop in crime, as conservatives had predicted, nor a spike in killings, as liberals had expected... The fears were overblown... Liberals often inadvertently antagonize gun owners and empower the National Rifle Association by coming across as supercilious, condescending and spectacularly uninformed about the guns they propose to regulate. A classic of gun ignorance. New York passed a law three years ago banning gun magazines holding more than seven cartridges; without realizing that for most guns there is no such thing as a magazine for seven cartridges or less... If lawmakers want to pass gun legislation, they'd best learn about firearms first."

"For over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limit on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation. In 1939 the Supreme Court unanimously held that Congress could prohibit the possession of a sawed-off shotgun because that weapon had no reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a “well regulated militia.” During the years when Warren Burger was our chief justice, from 1969 to 1986, no judge, federal or state, as far as I am aware, expressed any doubt as to the limited coverage of that amendment. When organizations like the National Rifle Association disagreed with that position and began their campaign claiming that federal regulation of firearms curtailed Second Amendment rights, Chief Justice Burger publicly characterized the N.R.A. as perpetrating “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” In 2008, the Supreme Court overturned Chief Justice Burger’s and others’ long-settled understanding of the Second Amendment’s limited reach by ruling, in District of Columbia v. Heller, that there was an individual right to bear arms. I was among the four dissenters. That decision — which I remain convinced was wrong and certainly was debatable — has provided the N.R.A. with a propaganda weapon of immense power. Overturning that decision via a constitutional amendment to get rid of the Second Amendment would be simple and would do more to weaken the N.R.A.’s ability to stymie legislative debate and block constructive gun control legislation than any other available option."

"By the light of the law, the answer is easy: The Constitution prohibits racial discrimination in all rights, including the right to bear arms. By the light of history, however, the answer is far more complicated. From America’s earliest days, the right to bear arms has been profoundly shaped by race. Indeed, for much of our history, the right’s protections extended almost exclusively to whites. The founding generation that adopted the Second Amendment also enacted racially discriminatory gun laws. Fearing slave revolts, early American lawmakers prohibited slaves — and often free blacks, too — from possessing weapons of any kind."

"The recent effort to find a new meaning for the Second Amendment comes from the failure of appeals to other sources as a warrant for the omnipresence of guns of all types in private hands. Easy access to all these guns is hard to justify in pragmatic terms, as a matter of social policy. Mere common law or statute may yield to common sense and specific cultural needs. That is why the gun advocates appeal, above pragmatism and common sense, to a supposed sacred right enshrined in a document Americans revere. Those advocates love to quote Sanford Levinson, who compares the admitted “social costs” of adhering to gun rights with the social costs of observing the First Amendment. We have to put up with all kinds of bad talk in the name of free talk. So we must put up with our world-record rates of homicide, suicide, and accidental shootings because, whether we like it or not, the Constitution tells us to. Well, it doesn’t."

"Gun rights and gun control, however, have lived together since the birth of the country. Americans have always had the right to keep and bear arms as a matter of state constitutional law. Today, 43 of the 50 state constitutions clearly protect an individual’s right to own guns, apart from militia service. Yet we’ve also always had gun control. The Founding Fathers instituted gun laws so intrusive that, were they running for office today, the NRA would not endorse them. While they did not care to completely disarm the citizenry, the founding generation denied gun ownership to many people: not only slaves and free blacks, but law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution."

""LIBERATE MINNESOTA!" "LIBERATE MICHIGAN!""LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!" (via @realDonaldTrump tweets)"

"...The second amendment, passed in 1791, allowing US citizens access to arms, was manageable when most firearms were muskets that took minutes to load."

"The beauty of the second amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."

"When governments fear the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny."

"The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government."

"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms. . . disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. . . Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."

"Firearms stand next in importance to the Constitution itself. They are the people's liberty teeth and keystone under independence. From the hour the Pilgrims landed, to the present day, events, occurrences and tendencies prove that to ensure peace, security and happiness, the rifle and pistol are equally indispensable. The very atmosphere of firearms everywhere restrains evil interference - they deserve a place of honor with all that's good."